Russia’s New T-14 Armata Tank Is a Terror (It Just Has One Giant Problem)

19fortyfive.com

9 points·rntn··7 comments

The inability to mass-produce complex high-tech items is a known problem for Russia. It even effects chip production. For example, Russian flagship semiconductor company mikron.ru was not able to switch from 90 to 65nm for the last like 6 or 7 years. 65nm is still listed as experimental [1]. I thought that this was some kind of a corruption tax or barrier that made it impossible to scale the production, but given how widespread was this, I started to suspect that other factors were at play.

[1] https://www.mikron.ru/capabilities/technology/

I can't judge if this Twitter thread is authoritive or not but it does raise some interesting points

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388?s...

Unrolled twitter thread for people who don't have twitter accounts: https://twtext.com/article/1501360272442896388

Thanks for the link. That explains a lot. Mafia state and high tech at scale cannot be compatible indeed.

The night-vision system on T-14 was the prominent holdup; Russia could not source it from France as desired. I wager there are other chip problems like your example.

Soviet Union had relatively good infrared optics. I guess Russia missed even that ability. But then the parallel answer with twitter link described why this happened perfectly.

problem is it's never really been made.

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